Broken Country (Reese’s Book Club)

2. Before 1955

Before 1955

I don’t know I am trespassing, I am lost in a dreamworld, my head full of romantic scenarios in which I triumph. I picture myself beside a fountain with an orchestra in full flow, receiving an impassioned declaration of love. I read a lot of Austen and Bront? at this time, I have a tendency to embellish.

I must have been staring up at the sky, head in the clouds quite literally: The collision comes out of nowhere.

“What the hell?”

This boy I bump into, his shoulder bashing into mine, is no hero. Tall, slender, arrogant, like a teenage Mr. Darcy.

“Don’t you look?” he says. “This is private land.”

I find the whole “private land” thing slightly absurd, particularly when it’s accompanied by a curt, cut glass accent like this one. This meadow we are in, green and curving, oaks with their cloud-bloom flowering, is England in its full glory. It’s Keats, it’s Wordsworth. It should be for everyone to enjoy.

“Are you smiling?” He looks so annoyed, I almost laugh.

“We’re in the middle of nowhere. There is no one else here. How could it possibly matter?”

The boy stares back at me for a moment before he takes in what I have said. “You’re right. God. What is wrong with me?” He holds out his hand, a peace offering. “Gabriel Wolfe.”

“I know who you are.”

He looks at me expectantly, waiting for my name. But I don’t feel like telling him yet. I’ve heard talk of Gabriel Wolfe, the famously handsome boy from the big house, but this is the first time I’ve seen him in the flesh. He has a good face: dark eyes framed by eyelashes my girlfriends would kill for, wavy brown hair that flops across his forehead, sharp cheekbones, elegant nose. A patrician kind of beauty, I suppose you might call it. But he is wearing tweed trousers tucked into woolly socks. Draped across his shoulders like a cape is a jacket of matching tweed, belt dangling. Old man’s clothes. He’s not my type at all.

“What were you doing here?”

“Looking for a place to sit and read.” I draw my book out of my coat pocket—a slim volume of Emily Dickinson.

“Oh. Poetry.”

“You sound a little disappointed. P. G. Wodehouse more your thing?”

He sighs. “I know what you’re thinking. But you’re wrong.”

I’m smiling again, I can’t help it. “What are you, a mind reader?”

“You think I’m a brainless, upper-class twit. A Bertie Wooster.”

I tilt my head and consider him. “He’d love your getup, you have to admit. He’d say it was spiffing.”

When Gabriel laughs, it changes him completely.

“These are my father’s old fishing trousers. I nicked them out of a box of stuff going to the jumble sale. I wouldn’t have worn them if I’d known you’d take such offense.”

“Is that what you’re doing, fishing?”

“Yes, just down there. I’ll show you, if you like.”

“I thought it was out-of-bounds for plebs like me?”

“You see, that’s why you have to come. I’ve been rude and I’d like to make it up to you.”

I stand before him, unsure. I don’t want to get caught up in something that is hard to get out of. All I wanted was a pretty spot to sit and read.

He smiles again, that face-changing smile. Handsome even in his old man’s garb. “I’ve got biscuits. Please come.”

“What kind of biscuits?”

Gabriel hesitates. “Custard creams.”

Fountain, orchestra. Lake, biscuits. It’s not so much of a stretch.

“Well, in that case…” I say, and this is how it begins.